Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon to sell books and built the infrastructure a large part of the internet runs on. Born in 1964 in Albuquerque to a seventeen-year-old mother, he was adopted by her second husband, a Cuban immigrant whose name he took, and spent summers on his grandfather's Texas ranch. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton and went to a New York quantitative hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, where he became a senior vice-president at thirty. He left in 1994 on noticing that web usage was growing at something like 2,300 per cent a year, and drove to Seattle writing the business plan on the way. Books were chosen deliberately: millions of distinct titles, more than any physical shop could stock, and a commodity product no customer needed to inspect. The company sold at a loss for years on the principle that scale and selection would compound, and it survived the dot-com crash when almost nothing else did. Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006, was the larger idea. Having built computing infrastructure for itself, the company rented it out — and created the cloud industry, which now supplies most of Amazon's profit and hosts a substantial share of the web. He bought the Washington Post in 2013 and founded Blue Origin in 2000. He stepped down as chief executive in 2021. The company's warehouse conditions, its treatment of unionisation, and its market power are the standing charges against it. He is among the wealthiest people alive and has given away a far smaller share of it than his peers.
- Lived: 1964 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, businessman
